Voter-owned elections come to Portland

By a 4-1 vote, the Portland City Council has put public funding of campaigns for city office in place for the 2006 elections. Congratulations to them.

You can read some background here; in a nutshell, it works like this:

The proposal gives mayoral candidates $200,000 for primary campaigns and $250,000 for runoffs. To participate, they must collect $5 checks from 1,500 people.

Candidates for city commissioner and auditor need $5 donations from 1,000 people to receive $150,000 for primaries and $200,000 for general elections. Qualified candidates also will receive matching money if an opponent opts out of the public system and spends more than the public-finance maximums.

The plan also calls for the system to be reviewed by voters in 2010.

The Oregonian, being the Oregonian, had a survey ready to show that fifty six percent of registered Portland voters didn't like the idea. Their report of the results came complete with cherry-picked quotes from Portlanders who agreed with the anti-public-finance talking points:

Patricia DeLozier, 43, a Southeast Portland mother of three, said that's too much money when there are other needs.

"I don't know how you can even talk about doing that when we don't have enough money to keep our schools open, and we can't pave all our roads," said DeLozier. "I don't know how you can say that's a priority."

Jim McKillip, a small-business owner from Southwest Portland, said he supports the idea of public financing, but wants the city to wait until the economy picks up. [ . . . ]

"I'd like to see them spend the money we do have trying to fight the meth problem," McKillip said. "This isn't the time." [ . . . ]

Fae Brown, a Southeast Portland retiree, is more concerned with how the City Council spends her tax dollars than how they interact with each other and the public. She's not happy with Potter or with city commissioners' public-financing push.

"I'm on a fixed income. I do fairly well, but I watch my pennies. I don't go to Starbucks," Brown said. "I don't see them thinking that way."

I take a backseat to no one in my support for education funding, or my disdain of potholes and meth labs. But let's look a little closer at that $1.3 million budgeted for publicly-financed campaigns:

Here's how spending tallied up for the top two candidates in the 2004 Portland mayoral race:

Potter: $155,623.60
Francesconi: $439.237.80

Granted, this was an unusual election: Historically, the candidate who spends the most money has won in about 95% of Portland races. But this time Potter, the candidate who kept a lid on campaign finances by declining contributions over $25, won by a big margin:

Potter: 168,377 votes (61.01%)
Francesconi: 105,017 votes (38.05%)

On his council run in September 2003, 60% of Francesconi's money came from these groups:

• Financial/Insurance/Real Estate
• General Business
• Construction
• Agriculture/Timber

(Courtesy of Money in Politics Research Action Project. PDF file requires Adobe Acrobat reader.)

Let's assume those economic interests stayed by Francesconi for the 2004 mayoral race. Maybe Agriculture/Timber went down a little and Lawyers & Lobbyists went up. Whatever. But let's just use it as a rough yardstick. That would mean that these interests popped for about half of Francesconi's campaign.

So ask yourself these two questions:

1. Do you imagine they expected nothing back for it? (And the same for the money they gave in the Council races?)


2. And if you concede that they'd want something in return, do you imagine that the price tag would stop before it gets to the $1.3 million that publicly-financed elections are projected to cost?

Paying $1.3 million to widen the pool of candidates and decrease the likelihood that candidates will be beholden to big-ticket donors once they get in office begins to sound like a steal, doesn't it?

I don't mean this to reflect badly on Francesconi, who's an honest politician and whose campaign was financed in a perfectly legal manner, as far as I know.

I mean it to reflect badly on the inefficient system of privately financed elections. As Kinsley's Law of Scandals puts it, the scandal isn't what they do that's illegal; it's what they do that's legal. Or, as Molly Ivins famously observed, you got to dance with them what brung you. As long as campaigns are -- must be -- available to the highest bidder, this is the system we've created for ourselves.

If nothing else, the numbers suggest that the Financial/Insurance/Real Estate interests, the General Business interests, the Construction interests, and the Agriculture/Timber interests don't really account for the full range of opinion in this town. The Oregonian reports:

The auditor's report shows that from 1992 to 2003, more than 56 percent of contributions to City Council winners came from 10 out of 51 Portland ZIP code areas. Last year, almost half of primary and general election fundraising by candidates in contested general elections came from 10 ZIP code areas.

Potter noted, somewhat jokingly, that people in those presumably ritzier areas shouldn't worry about losing political clout: "We'll see a tremendous increase in economic development in those ZIP codes, because they won't have to contribute those large amounts anymore."

Perhaps they'll find something sooner to spend their money on: The Oregonian, being the Oregonian, editorialized this week that the plan--again, passed 4-to-1 by elected Council members--won't "really" reflect the will of the people unless it's put to the voters on the May 2006 ballot.